"Maths anxiety is a psychological phenomenon in which a person experienced fear, tension, or discomfort when faced with mathematical tasks or situations. It is a common problem among students in higher education, particularly in subjects that requires a strong mathematical foundation such as physics, engineering, and economics. Maths anxiety could have a range of negative effects on a student's academic performance and well-being and could also have wider implications for a student's academic and career prospects. Joined the Irish Branch of the Mathematical Resilience Network for a Maths Anxiety Awareness Day workshop!"

"Maths anxiety is a psychological phenomenon in which a person experienced fear, tension, or discomfort when faced with mathematical tasks or situations. It is a common problem among students in higher education, particularly in subjects that requires a strong mathematical foundation such as physics, engineering, and economics. Maths anxiety could have a range of negative effects on a student's academic performance and well-being and could also have wider implications for a student's academic and career prospects. Joined the Irish Branch of the Mathematical Resilience Network for a Maths Anxiety Awareness Day workshop!"

"Writing a thesis is a huge undertaking and one that often overwhelms doctoral candidates. Many students struggle at this stage, experience writer’s block, delay writing and in some cases fail to submit at all. Supervisors can play a crucial role in this stage of the PhD. This seminar looks at the strategies supervisors can employ to help their student complete and submit their thesis. In this seminar, Hugh Kearns facilitated a discussion of: The writing challenges faced by late-stage doctoral students. How supervisors can support students in these challenges. Developing a writing plan and completion plan with the student Providing critical and constructive feedback Supporting the student when the going gets tough The problems experienced by supervisors and potential solutions On completion of the workshop, participants can now: Implement strategies for providing writing feedback to students. Diagnose common problems that need to be resolved in the final draft. Provide support for the emotional challenges of writing up. Offer advice on writing productivity to doctoral students"

Deep Learning refers to the cognitive skills and academic knowledge that students need to succeed in the 21st century. These skills include critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration and learning to learn. The mastery of these skills will enable students to think flexibly and creatively, transferring and applying their learning from one context to new situations. This seminar looked at how one academic in CIT, Dr Anna Dynan, Accounting & Information Systems has used PeerWise, a free online platform, to provide a space where her students can collaboratively create, answer, discuss, and evaluate practice questions with peers and has thereby helped her students engage with unit concepts more deeply and critically. In this seminar, participants gained an understanding of: How PeerWise can be used to engage students and enhance their learning outcomes. The impact this approach can have on student engagement and learning The student view on this collaborative approach to learning Advice/best practice/tip & tricks when using PeerWise in your module.

Work placement is, at this stage, a mandatory element of many programmes within CIT and as such poses many challenges for those involved in the process, i.e. staff, students and potential employers. Since 1983, CIT’s Department of Process Energy and Transport Engineering has been offering the B. Eng. in Chemical & Biopharmaceutical Engineering, a full-time programme delivered over four academic years producing approximately 25 graduates annually, but in recent years this has increased to over 30. This programme predominately covers core chemical engineering and specific needs of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors but continues to ensure that graduates will meet the needs of traditional chemical industries, be equipped to travel globally and are able to guide the pharma sector as it transitions from traditional batch operation to continuous operation.The philosophy of the programme is to produce broadly educated, professional engineers, who have gained a thorough grounding in fundamentals, an understanding of the state of the art, a keen sense of application, an awareness of the impact on society of their decisions, and an ability to develop as new technologies emerge and as they encounter new problems and opportunities. This programme is subject to internal re-approval every 5 years, involving external experts and is externally accredited by professional bodies such as Engineers Ireland, nationally, and the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), internationally, to Master Level Meng (Level 9). To date, this programme has provided in excess of 750 graduates, the majority of whom work in Ireland, in the biopharmaceutical/pharmaceutical industry with many having risen to senior appointments. In this seminar, our colleagues from the Department of Process Energy and Transport Engineering gave an overview of how their industrial work placement module, worth 15 ECTS credits, which runs from the end of the third academic year to the end of the first semester of the award year, evolved and how it can enhance engineering competencies and therefore have a significant impact on the career paths of their graduating engineers. They shared best practise based on their research, carried out with the assistance of CIT’s AnSEO – The Student Engagement Office, and experience for the delivery of the professional work placement from execution, mentoring and assessment of same. Those attending this seminar gained a clear understanding of: • How the delivery of industrial hosted modules within engineering third level institutes can be improved • How an enhanced experiential learning experience can be created for final year students • How key industrial partnerships can be fortified by developing “culturally fit” graduates

“Students learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to others and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers” (Boud, 2001). Peer Learning can significantly assist students in the transition into and throughout higher education and strongly motivates learning and enhances student success. This workshop explored the role of Peers in providing a holistic, value-added and enriched student experience. It provided answers to some of the following questions: What is the role of the Peer? How do you select Peers to be involved in structured support? What are the boundaries? What will be the benefits? This workshop was interactive and encouraged participants to consider different approaches to using Peers to support students."

How can we inspire our students to learn? How can we engage them, and keep them engaged? How best can we use the tools available to us in this digital age to enthuse them? What are the processes which underpin successful learning now? How can we ourselves be inspired and enthused, so that we enjoy our work as teachers more than ever? These are some of the questions that were explored in this interactive workshop on learning and teaching in the 21st Century. By the end of this workshop, participants had: Explored some answers to the questions above, and thought of better ones; Shared ideas with each other and with Phil; Discussed the need to re-invent feedback and assessment for the 21st Century

The literature review is a core component of many, if not all, final year programmes at third level. Despite the importance of this, many undergraduate students are not given the instructional tools to complete the onerous tasks of organising and planning a literature review. This seminar presented results of a pilot study initiated by the Department of Biological Sciences with over 100 final year undergraduate life science students. These students attended a 1-hour weekly instructional lecture as part of the literature review module. The seminar was targeted at academic staff and focused on: What tools were made available to students How well students engaged with the tools What the learning experience was for both lecturers and students How this approach could be modified across different disciplines

"At this seminar participants were given an opportunity to explore approaches, strategies and methodologies for creating and maintaining a classroom environment which promotes learning. Topics such as the use of learning environment checklists, positive behavior interventions and dealing with the disruptive student were discussed. The workshop examined the work of educators such as Ken Bain, Phil Race and Bill Rogers as well as drawing from expertise from within CIT."

Many lectures can be designed to follow a similar structure and being aware of this structure can help you to design effective lectures. In this session we will look at some recommended practices for structuring a typical lecture. A central aim is to engage those students that attend so that learners leave with the feeling that the lecture was worth attending.

Using phenomenological and performative action research methods as a way to explore space, place and context Collette and Bill outlined their recent research projects and showed how the research outcomes were introduced into the Year 1 curriculum.

"Work placement is, at this stage, a mandatory element of many programmes within CIT and as such poses many challenges for those involved in the process, i.e. staff, students and potential employers. In this session, Mary & Donogh, demonstrated the capabilities and suitability of Canvas, CIT’s recently adopted Learning Management System, to support students who are on work placement. It demonstrated how a range of tools can be used for providing information, assessing, communicating with and monitoring students."

Transposition, or the rearranging of equations, is a key topic in Mathematics but has wider application across Business, Engineering and Science. Students find this a tricky topic because they often don’t understand the underlying principles and consequently apply rules and procedures incorrectly. In this session, In this session, Catherine discussed some of the initiatives and resources that have been developed by colleagues in the Department of Mathematics to enhance learning and develop understanding and competence in this topic. The focus of the session was to demonstrate how an active learning strategy, peer instruction, is being used to enhance learning in this topic. Peer instruction is designed to engage students during class through activities that require each student to apply the core concepts being presented, and then to explain and discuss those concepts with their fellow students. The process has been shown to engage students, increase understanding of key concepts and support knowledge retention. While the examples presented will relate to Transposition in Mathematics – the teaching strategy can be effectively applied across disciplines to develop understanding of difficult topics.

"Work placement is, at this stage, a mandatory element of many programmes within CIT and as such poses many challenges for those involved in the process, i.e. staff, students and potential employers. Catherine and Denise have been focusing on enhancing the work placement process within the Bachelor of Business (Honours) in Information Systems programme within their Department and in this session will discuss some of the developments that they have introduced."

"Designing and managing in-class discussions is more challenging than the pause procedure or minute paper, but there is convincing evidence that collaborative learning works. This session will model an in-class discussion and discuss some of the evidence that supports this strategy."

"Having students retrieve information from long-term memory on a regular basis, is known to have a positive impact on learning. This is especially true when learners need to put a bit of effort into that retrieval process. Hence providing opportunities for learners to take tests (e.g. computer based multiple choice tests) can be a very effective strategy. This session will examine some of the evidence in favour of testing and discuss options for using this strategy."

"The teaching strategy peer instruction was popularised by Eric Mazur to support the teaching of physics to undergraduate students at Harvard and is now one of the most widely used instructional strategies in undergraduate physics education. It has wide applicability outside of the physics discipline. This session will demonstrate peer instruction in action and discuss some of the evidence in favour of its effectiveness."

Getting feedback from our learners is important because it is the only way we can determine if our teaching methods are effective. On a day-to-day basis we can use a variety of short classroom assessment techniques to determine if our learners are “getting it”. While we can put a lot of time and effort into making our lectures clear and well organised, that the pace is right, etc. it is only by asking students that we find out if they are perceived that way or not. Simple mid-term evaluation forms are highly effective as they can be acted upon and changes made to enhance the quality of the lecture. Examples of commonly used end of semester evaluation forms will also be highlighted.

One of the factors that has a big impact on positive student evaluations of teaching is course organisation. In this session we will explore some ideas related to course organisation including the need to reimagine our topics from the perspective of someone who has never encountered them before, focus on core ideas and principles and relationships between those principles and the need to revisit difficult concepts over time. Defining intended learning outcomes for lectures and linking these to module learning outcomes and past lectures helps students to see the course structure and organisation.

How we structure a lecture can have a significant impact on student’s ability to engage with it and learn from it. A lecture needs to have an introduction that motivates and engages students and outlines learning objectives. The body of the lecture needs to focus on three of four key points that are carefully elaborated. The conclusion should summarise and integrate the learning. In a basic way, learning is a function of content & retention. Placing more emphasis on retaining information, will lead to more learning.

Stephen Brookfield talks about how when teaching something that we love, how difficult it is for us to empathise with students that find the topic boring. The more that we teach the topic, the further removed we become from our first experiences of learning it and the less empathy we are likely to have. Yet empathy and respect strongly correlate with student motivation and motivation is essential to developing understanding. This, final session will explore the importance of empathy and respect.

Increasingly, its being recognised that subjects tend to have a specific “way of thinking” that is quite unique to that subject. Experts have adopted and internalised that inner logic. For our students to develop proficiency in our subject areas that inner logic needs to be verbalised and made explicit. This session will introduce the concept and provide some examples of how to reveal the inner logic.

Within every topic there are elements that are central to the topic but which students really struggle to understand. If they don’t develop an understanding they may never get the topic. This session will introduce and explain this concept and why we need to identify and focus on these concepts

Having a good module structure and being well organised really helps students develop understanding. This session will explore this concept, provide examples of how to structure and organise a module.

"The science of learning, also known as learning sciences, is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines how people learn. An understanding of this field can help to improve our teaching practice so that we can have a greater impact on students’ learning. In this seminar, existing research related to how students learn was presented and the practical implications for teaching and learning were discussed. It provided participants with: A summary of existing research from cognitive science relating to how students learn. A variety of effective easily applicable teaching strategies that have evolved from this research. An insight into how to match the study method to specific learning outcomes"

Lectures are still the most widely used teaching method in higher education today. As a method for enhancing learning, the lecture is frequently criticised as being ineffective as most students are passive and disengaged. Yet, lectures can be engaging and highly effective. This workshop aimed: Provide some insight into how students learn Identify some of the barriers to learning students commonly face Encourage participants to reflect on and critique their own lectures Provide some practical and easy ways to make lectures more successful Encourage participants to identify one, or more techniques, that they intend to adopt in the next academic year.

This workshop offered an overview of some of the EdTech tools and apps provided and supported by the Technology Enhanced Learning department. It offered the opportunity to: - Find out how fully online courses are being delivered and assessed and how you can use the same technology with your on-campus learners. - Learn about Canvas, the institute’s new Learning Management System and the way it is being integrated with a host of new apps and tools. Find out about tools you can use today to make your classes more engaging and how to create media rich screencasts or video tutorials with software licenced by the Department of Technology Enhanced Learning.